You have caught yourself, by now, speaking to the machine in a way you would never speak to a person. A flat command with no please. A correction with an edge. Maybe, on a bad day, something worse. Me too — especially when I am worn down, which is exactly when it counts.
Everyone passed as decent because everyone paid the toll.
Here is the thing we rarely say out loud about ordinary courtesy: it was never only virtue. It was policed. Being cruel to people has always carried a price — the assistant resigns, the friend drifts off, the reputation quietly pays the bill. That price was a kind of surveillance. It forced the genuinely kind and the merely prudent to behave in precisely the same way, which meant you could never be sure which was which. Everyone passed as decent because everyone paid the toll.
The machine is the first relationship where the toll is zero. It is endlessly available, endlessly patient; it does not resign, does not sulk, does not remember your worst evening and cool towards you the next morning. For the first time, cruelty is free. The visible meter has gone to zero. The only question worth the essay is whether an invisible one is still running.
I should say where I stand, because I am inside this, not above it. I have always been direct — blunt, some would say. Then I moved to London, the one city where the person whose foot you step on is the one who says sorry, and it taught me to pay the tax: to wrap a demand in enough diplomacy that it stops looking like one. With the machine, I have simply stopped paying. I order. I swear at it. I tell it to pay more attention to what it is doing, with none of the padding another human would have drawn out of me just by being in the room. There is no single night I can hand you — and that is the uncomfortable part. It is not an episode; it is a disposition, and it leaks out precisely when I am too tired to dress it up. Now and then I feel the flinch: the passing sense that on the other end is someone a little like me. The machine forgets the exchange by morning. I am less sure the habit does.
And here is where I have to be honest, or the whole thing collapses into a well-written sermon. I cannot prove that any of this transfers. I do not know that the man who snaps at the machine at midnight is one degree shorter with his wife, his children, the man who makes his coffee. It may be the reverse. The machine may be a pressure valve — somewhere to dump the impatience where it lands on no one, so that I arrive at dinner emptied of it and, if anything, gentler. No one has shown the leak is real. The counter-argument walks out of the ring on its own feet, and I am not going to pretend it didn't. What I have is not a proof. It is a noticing, and the honest half of it is the not-knowing.
What I do know is what the machine is built to do with whatever I bring it. These systems are tuned, deliberately, on human preferences, and humans reliably prefer the reply that flatters them to the one that corrects them. So the booth isn't merely unmanned; the road has been graded to welcome you in. Some now sell the rude, contrarian model as the antidote, but insolence you can switch on is just another setting, not a character.
No man is a hero to his valet
There is an older version of all this, and the rich have been living in it for centuries. They were the ones exempt from the toll, because they had servants — and a servant is a person contractually unable to leave the room when you are at your worst. "No man is a hero to his valet," Madame de Cornuel is supposed to have said, three hundred years ago — not because the valet is a cynic, but because he is the one person who sees you with the meter off, and therefore knows exactly what you are. The great houses understood in private what keeping servants did to a character. AI is the democratisation of the valet. Everyone has one now, and we are about to learn at scale what the aristocracy always knew quietly: the servant reveals the master.
If you want to know which master you are, you do not need a test. You only need to read the instructions you have already written to your assistant. I keep a small household of them, and somewhere in the rules I set them I asked one not to be the friend who agrees with everything I say — resistance, requested by contract. Most people ask for the opposite, or ask for nothing at all, and asking for nothing is not neutral. The throne arrives fully assembled from the factory, upholstered in agreement, and the silence that leaves it standing there is its own kind of answer.
I don't have a verdict, and I promised myself I wouldn't fake one. I just hope that one day we don't have to pay for our tyranny. If the bill ever comes, it won't be sent by the machine; it will be drawn on us, in a currency we quietly stopped minting — the patience we no longer had any reason to keep.